Altadena Cars & Coffee honors classic cars burned in Eaton fire

It’s 8 a.m. on a Saturday and cars are starting to roll into the parking lot next to Unincorporated Coffee in Altadena. There’s a green 1979 Mercedes 300SD Turbo Diesel in the corner, sitting next to a rust-orange vintage Mustang. Across from it, a shiny blue Volkswagen Mk4 R32 takes the slot next to a long, powder blue low-rider and a beautifully pinstriped 1948 Chevrolet truck, which rolled in blaring its siren-like horn.

To get to this week’s Altadena Cars & Coffee meetup, a Saturday hangout for car enthusiasts, attendees had to traverse some portion of Altadena, passing homes and businesses reduced to rubble by the Eaton fire. Tyreke and Traivon Jackson passed their lot at Lincoln Avenue and Figueroa Street, where they’d worked on cars for as long as they could remember. Passersby wouldn’t have known what was on the lot before the fire, but now, with fences and foliage destroyed, the damage is clear.

“We lost a ‘64 Impala convertible, a ‘79 Monte Carlo, two ‘87 Cutlasses and an ‘83 Coupe de Ville,” Traivon Jackson said. There was a 2002 Camaro on the lot as well, plus a 2005 Chevy Silverado, a Ford F-450, and a boat and its trailer. While the latter two were essentially vaporized by the fire, the burned shells of the others remain, steel sentinels left ravaged by the flames.

Dave Stone estimates that somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 cars burned in the Eaton fire, and he would know. As @Not_EV_Altadena on Instagram, Stone has spent the past three months documenting the cars left behind, including those on the Jacksons’ lot. He also created the car meetups for those who follow or have been featured on his account. Never really a car guy before, Stone took to walking through the burn scar in the immediate wake of the fire. Near the Altadena Country Club, amid a swath of homes that were destroyed, he spotted a fire-scorched Ford truck, framed perfectly by palm trees. He thought it was “hauntingly beautiful,” so he snapped a picture on his phone, and in the days and weeks that followed, he captured more pictures of the cars left behind.

Stone, who works in music licensing, was doing it, he said, in part because his 13-year-old son loves cars, but also just because he felt like he had to. Though he lives just south of the Altadena border in Pasadena, his heart broke for his neighbors and friends, as well as for the community he admired. Stone decided to put all his car photos on Instagram, dubbing his account “Not EV” after the phrase the Environmental Protection Agency spray-paints on gas-powered cars after removing their batteries. (Electric vehicles get a blue lightning bolt, which is then painted white when their batteries are removed.)

“Some of these cars saw World War I, World War II and Vietnam,” Stone said. “They lived through disco and heavy metal and the Challenger explosion and the invention of the internet and Barack [Obama] and 9/11 and the Iraq war. And then at the very end of their lives, someone just paints ‘Not EV’ on them, which is bizarre to me, like the EPA is saying something is what it isn’t. It’s as if years from now, when there are very believable robots walking our Earth, you have to have your casket say ‘Not Robot’ on the outside so someone knows not to try to take the lithium out of you.”

Now, Stone said, he’s taken more than 9,000 photos of Altadena’s lost cars. He’s posted many to his Instagram, writing emotional blurbs to accompany the snaps, like “They are weekend cars. The ones in the back. In the garage. Behind the side of the house. You gotta move all the cars outta the way. Find the wife’s keys in one of her purses. Move the dailies out to the street and after the drive do it all in reverse. It’s always worth it.” He said he wants to be like “the Lorax for cars,” citing the popular Dr. Seuss character, and hopes that his account can help the cars’ owners not only mourn but start to heal.

And for some owners, the healing process has been spurred along by posing for photos with their cars or by rolling through Altadena Cars & Coffee. If people want to come, grab a latte and look at beautiful cars, they can, but they can also use the time to connect with others who know almost exactly what they’re going through.

Will Stifel stands next to his 1952 Ford F1 truck, which launched Dave Stone’s interest in photographing cars burned by the Eaton fire.

(Dave Stone)

That’s why Will Stifel was there. His 1952 Ford F1 truck was the subject of Stone’s first photo, and it had been in his family for 50 years. It was in the film “Million Dollar Baby,” which shot in Altadena, and while Stifel originally thought the truck — like the home it sat behind — was a total loss, he’s been given a glimmer of hope in recent days. An auto shop in El Sereno has offered to try and repair the truck, which has little damage on the side that didn’t face the fire. The engine’s still intact, and with only 56,000 miles on the truck, it would be a shame to just junk it.

“Everybody in Altadena is scattered to the wind right now, so you need to have these events to come together,” Stifel said. “It’s nice to be able to talk to people about how to rebuild, or to just grab a cup of coffee and feel normal.”

For Lauren Ward, another attendee who’s been featured on the @Not_EV account, being at Cars & Coffee is about community. She lost her home and three cars — a 1957 Chevy 3200 pickup truck, a 2004 Volkswagen Mk4 R32 and a 2001 Volkswagen MK4 GTI VR6 — and while she’s managed to replace one of the VWs since, she still tears up talking about the fire’s effects.

“You need something that feels normal,” Ward said. “A lot of us don’t have homes or we have homes that we can’t live in, but coming here with a car — any car, really — makes you feel like there’s still a sense of community. Our neighborhoods might be gone and our neighbors might be gone, but through cars, you can still connect.”

Ward particularly likes how Altadena Cars & Coffee welcomes all car comers, from those who lost classic cars to those who mourn their late-model Subaru Forester. There are gearheads who go and people with Instagram accounts devoted to their cars, but there are also people there like Kevin Kuzma, who lost his deceased mom’s 1957 Chevrolet 210. She died a few years back and left the Canyon Coral-colored car, which had less than 50,000 miles on it, to her two sons. While she’d never fixed it up like she wanted, Kuzma’s brother thought he could try, provided Kuzma could store the car until he could drive down from Portland to retrieve it.

Now, in what Kuzma calls a “wildly unlikely” outcome, since the DMV and insurance have deemed the ‘57 “unrepairable,” it’s been sold to the people behind Pasadena Classic Cars. They plan on replacing the engine and interior but clear coating the car body as is. They hope to take the burned relic to car shows starting later this year. Kuzma calls the car’s sale “the absolute best-case scenario considering what happened,” and said he and his brother plan to go see the car once it’s on display.

The ‘57’s fate is not too dissimilar from another car Stone featured on his Instagram. He retrieved the 1985 Porsche 911 Slantnose from a lot with the help of people he’d met through the account and took it to an event at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Stone thought the burned shell could serve as a tool to raise awareness about the enormity of what was lost in Altadena, including not just the cars but also those who loved them.

That includes Oswald “Ozzie” Altmetz, who lived across from Kuzma and died in the Eaton fire. His grandson, Colorado resident Tyler Walton, found @Not_EV_Altadena when he was scrolling on Instagram earlier this year. Walton, a car body repairman and painter, invited Stone to visit his grandfather’s property not only to capture pictures of his cars, including a 1971 Volkswagen Westfalia and a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, but also because he wanted to celebrate Altmetz’s life and legacy, like the years he spent in L.A.’s hot rod scene wrenching alongside people like Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard and customizing cars featured in Pasadena’s Rose Parade. He was in town for his grandfather’s memorial as well as the Petersen event, but he stopped to pay his respects in Altadena first.

Dave Stone retrieved this 1985 Porsche 911 Slantnose burned in the Eaton fire to display at a Petersen Automotive Museum event to raise awareness about the fire’s impact.

(Dave Stone)

“Cars & Coffee is great,” Walton said, “because no matter where I’m at in the United States, I know that I can go to something like this and be surrounded by people that speak the exact same language as me.”

The meetup has outgrown Unincorporated Coffee’s parking lot and there are plans to eventually move to Bulgarini, an Italian restaurant in Altadena. The event will still have Unincorporated Coffee though, Stone said.

Because of people like Altmetz, Ward and the Jacksons, Stone said he’s now determined to make Cars & Coffee the greatest car meetup in all of California. “We had all these cars and crazy builders, like these amazing, talented people, but nobody knew,” he said. “I’ve talked to people who have said ‘I had no idea my neighbors had that car,’ or ‘I had no idea they were car people too.’ I guess it just took all the fences and homes burning down for us to find each other.”

For information about future meetups, follow @altadenacarsandcoffee on Instagram.